In April 2017, while Democrats and Republicans were finding
common ground on starting a war in Syria following President Trump’s
retaliatory airstrike for a brutal chemical gas attack on civilians, the
so-called “alt-right” finally declared its break with the new administration.
Richard Spencer, the enigmatic center of the alt-right and their leading
“luminary,” took his rage to Twitter.

“The #AltRight is against a war in Syria. Period,” he said
to echoes of retweets. “If Trump takes us into war in Syria, I’m done with
him.”

Peter Brimelow’s anti-immigration website VDare continued
the disappointment with Trump, explaining that the three things voters ended up
with after becoming “Trump Republicans” were conflict with Syria, a Paul Ryan
healthcare plan and tax cuts for billionaires. Across the blogs, podcasts and
message boards, the alt-right is revolting against Trump, declaring his
capitulation to military intervention the ultimate betrayal.

For those who have been watching the rise of the far-right
in the United States, this response to Trump’s behavior may seem frenetically
schizophrenic. This notion comes largely from the belief that white supremacist
politics are based in traditional white colonialism, and that “America First”
means the ability to enact militarized genocide on the developing world at
will. The right-wing politics that the alt-right evolved from, however, is one
that is isolationist at its core. They believe nationalism means creating
strong boundaries between peoples, which would preclude intervention—both
humanitarian and mercantile.

Paleoconservatism,
an evolutionary stage leading up to the alt-right in the mid-2000s, was a
reactionary response to the growth of “compassionate” interventionist neo-conservatism
that rose to prominence inside of the GOP in the 1980s. The American Conservative, a
paleo-leaning publication founded by Pat Buchannan, has been running headlines
since this month’s bombing like “This Isn’t the Foreign Policy Trump Campaigned
On” and “Bombing Syria Doesn’t Provide Humanitarian Relief.” This is not
surprising since the defining principle of The
American Conservative in the
early 2000s was that it was the only major conservative institution to stand
against the invasion of Iraq.

This rejection of Syrian intervention is uniform on the
alt-right and signals the first major betrayal of the Trump presidency. Most
white nationalist ideologues did not think that Trump would actually carry out
a clean interpretation of their politics, but hoped they could mobilize him on
their key political issues like foreign policy, refugees and non-white
immigration. While he has enacted some of their agenda—including the Muslim
travel ban, which was taken largely from Kris Kobach and the anti-immigration
Tanton Network—his collaboration with Republican business interests has been
disheartening. In that sense, the Syria bombing is only the most recent
infidelity to the alt-right, albeit the most significant.

As a
prelude to the widening rift, Stephen Bannon was removed from his central role
on the National Security Council. The political world was shocked when Trump
first brought Bannon into his inner circle—his previous job having been as head
of Breitbart, which emerged as a “diet white nationalist” news site under his
reign. Bannon’s own civic nationalism is tinged with fascist esotericists like
Julius Evola and marked by allegations of open racialism and anti-Semitism. As
such, he is deeply tied to a post-paleo world, situated to the right of the GOP
and acting as the perfect weigh station between the fringe and the state house.

This was
as close as Trump could walk to the alt-right, especially when he moved him to
his advisory team. As Trump began to capitulate to the negotiations of party
politics, Bannon’s hard edge waned, and his removal forced the alt-right to
realize that Trump chose party loyalists over his dissident nationalist crew.
While the anti-Trump left played a role in making Bannon’s nationalism
politically toxic, it is more likely that Trump’s own power plays sunk his
status. The hope for Spencer and others was that it was Bannon’s secret
opposition to conflict with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that forced him
off the council.

This
break came after a long sequence of failures, each more significant than the
last, which sparked the doubt on the right that then shifted into an anger. The
alt-right could correctly be called a “post-libertarian” ideology, as most of
their rank-and-file came out of the libertarian movement before abandoning it
for ethnic nationalist reasons. Trump’s willingness to flirt with House Speaker
Paul Ryan’s anti-worker healthcare policies—which would hit white workers in
the Midwest and South especially hard—was a significant point of rupture. The
writing was on the wall for months, as his transition team became a glossy
episode of Lifestyles of the
Rich and Famous — especially from the international financial sector,
which the alt-right views through an anti-Semitic conspiracy lens.

As Trump moves further away from the dissident cadre he
brought into the halls of power with him, the alt-right is sent floundering,
lacking its clear connection to the mainstream. White nationalism is still
unpopular to the vast majority of Americans, so they need points of crossover
to recruit. The Trump spaces have been that—from the recent “MAGA” rallies to
the Students for Trump and Turning Point organizations on college campuses. If
the alt-right publicly denounces and organizes against Trump, as Spencer and
other major alt-right leaders are calling for, then the movement will lose
access to its largest pool of potential converts.

On Sunday, April 9 2017, Spencer led a couple dozen
supporters in front of the White House to protest Trump’s war in Syria. They
were overwhelmed by counter protesters, who, while also uniformly against the
military action, see no place for Spencer in any kind of public anti-war
movement. While the alt-right protest itself lacked any crossover appeal to the
broader Trump Republicans—a point solidified by the gathering’s anti-Semitic
messaging—such a crossover is necessary for the movement to make any material
gains.

If the alt-right is forced to divorce itself from Trump,
then its members will find themselves in the same boat that white nationalists
have always been in when their moderate allies turn on their agenda: completely
marginalized. While this would not be the worst political move for the
movement, without its own “purity politics” it lacks a reason for existing. The
only legitimacy it has provided to itself is that its white nationalism is
complete and explicit, presenting itself as the revolutionary alternative to
the capitulation of what it calls the “cuckservative” establishment.

To continue supporting Trump amid this deviation from the
program would reveal the movement’s own deal-making, and—without a strong sense
of how organizing works—its supporters will instead bank their reputation on
loud shows of anger rather than strategic thinking. This does not mean the
alt-right will voluntarily walk into obscurity, but as it attempts to reclaim
its identity firmly away from the Trump pulpit, its proponents will find they
made far less progress than they believed.

In the end, the alt-right stands to become just a fascist
movement that found a moment in the sun. That moment faded when its Trojan
Horse leader was appropriated by his own business party—thereby sending the
movement back to the fringes it desperately wanted to leave behind.

About the author

Shane Burley is a journalist whose work has been featured in
ThinkProgress, In These Times, Labor Notes, Make/Shift, and many other
publications. Find him at ShaneBurley.net or on Twitter at @shane_burley1.

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